Thousands of vulnerable children are being denied a state-funded boarding
school education because of council red tape and political ideology, a
leading head teacher has claimed.

The Government said two years ago that as many as 2,000 children from broken homes would be provided with boarding school places.

But an evaluation of the scheme published earlier this year found that only 18 of the 150 local authorities in England had signed up, and just 23 children had been placed – of whom six dropped out.

Melvyn Roffe, the chairman of the Boarding Schools Association, said local government bureaucracy, hostility towards boarding schools and a lack of "political muscle" from the centre have conspired to condemn children to a chaotic care system that is failing them.

"There are children who clearly would benefit from the stability of a boarding school setting and who are not. The money is there, the places are there but the organisation is not up to it. It is little short of criminal," said Mr Roffe, the head of Wymondham College, a state boarding school in Norfolk.

"Take a child whose mother is a drug user. He will be passed round and round in circles. Everyone is well-meaning and trying to help but the child is passed from this agency to that agency. Then they go off the rails and we wonder why.

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"We need to address the scandal of how local and central Government have failed to get to grips with this. There is a lot of hand wringing and blaming when it goes wrong but for the last few years we have been saying we can help – please use us."

Mr Roffe will tell the association's annual conference this week that the Government's boarding pathfinder is moving painfully slowly because of "bureaucracy and pockets of diehard ideological opposition" within local authorities.

At fees of about £20,000 a year, private boarding schools are a much cheaper option than placing children in local authority care, which can cost £50,000 a year.

State boarding schools, which have seen an expansion in the last few years, are even cheaper, with charges covering food and board only.

The Government's evaluation report on the scheme was largely positive about the effect it had had on the handful of pupils who had been given places so far, concluding that vulnerable children can flourish at boarding schools.

It said that while some schools were not prepared for the levels of difficulty presented by more troubled children, there was a need to challenge the "view held by many social care professionals that boarding schools were only appropriate form those from more privileged backgrounds."

Mr Roffe said that local authority procedures were aimed at trying to keep children in the family but when it was necessary to move a child, councils did not react quickly enough.

"We have the example of several hundred children over the years who have been supported by charitable trusts to attend private boarding schools. The outcomes are very good," he said.

"What boarding schools can do is prevent the nine or 10-year-old in difficult circumstances going down the wrong route and ending up as the 15- year-old who is excluded from school, involved in crime that no one knows what to do with.

"Our schools can obviously not cope with every child but for a larger number than most people would think, it would be a valuable experience. It is a mystery why this gift horse is being ignored. The systems in social services are just not up to it."

Earlier this year, the Government raised the funding given to councils for arranging boarding school placements from £5,000 to £10,000 but local authorities complain that this is not enough.

The Conservatives are considering the expansion of boarding school places for vulnerable children by creating new state-funded "residential academies".

New Government figures released last week show that only one in seven children in care reaches the Government's target of five good GCSEs at age 16.

The gap in achievement at GCSE between children in care and other children has risen again this year and has now widened by more than a quarter since 2001.